The challenges facing manufacturing companies today span across the industry, independent of company size or product. Especially, big manufacturers must overcome these challenges, and information technology (IT) collaboration with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) will play a major role in this effort. In this research, the strategy and way to promote IT collaboration between SMEs and large firms in heavy industries are proposed. A pre-consultation was performed to derive the strategy and way for the collaboration, and an IT collaboration system was developed reflection the results of pre-consultation. The IT collaboration system consists of two parts. One is ERP based on BPM for SMEs to standardize and visualize the entire business process from order placement to release. This system also provides their parent company with visibility into the status of orders and user can easily access the system on the web at a low price through cloud computing service. The other is interface part for data changes between large firms and SMEs. Thus far, this paper demonstrates the importance of strategy for the collaboration, and the applicability of IT collaboration system to elevate the speed and efficiency of business.

Recently, the collaboration among small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) has been recognized as an effective competitive tool. As several systems have been developed to boost the collaboration, it is necessary to analyze the effectiveness of the systems in terms of their contribution to enhance operational performance of SMEs through objective and quantitative validation. In particular, the analysis for SMEs rather than large-scaled enterprises has not received much attention due to lack of relevant information and difficulty of collecting data. This paper presents a framework for analyzing the effectiveness of the collaboration support system, called i-manufacturing hub, which has been implemented by Korean government. Identification of influential factors to the effectiveness of collaboration hub, and constructing necessary hypotheses are proposed. To overcome the difficulty in data collection only by means of surveys through subjective questionnaires, we exploit system log data that are generated while SMEs use the system. As an initial phase to analyze the effectiveness through hypothesis validation, we discuss several interesting observations and challenges in the direction of enhancing collaboration among SMEs for better operational performance improvement and more participation in the collaboration hub.

In the past, buyers and suppliers met each other to find common interests off-line in exhibitions and conferences, or through personal connection. These activities were time consuming and costly. With the advent of information era, these activities moved to online market places, where buyers search for suppliers with a set of keywords that are believed to be representative of their requirements. Its fundamental assumption is that all the potential candidates are registered in a certain database. However, recently buyers want to diversify suppliers due to needs of cost competitiveness or frequent new product development. To this end, instead of choosing suppliers from the supplier pool, discovering suppliers from all over the world should be emphasized. In order to enable buyers to describe their requirements and suppliers to capture their manufacturing capabilities via online market places, the semantic differences of terms between buyers and suppliers should be resolved. The paper summarizes various supplier discovery frameworks and prototype systems, which can be employed to expose domestic small-medium enterprises into global buyers in the near future.

Discovering the suppliers capable of manufacturing the parts that satisfy buyer requirements via current online market places remains difficult due to semantic differences between what the suppliers can produce and what the buyer wants to acquire. One of the promising approaches to overcome the semantic difference is to adopt an ontology to describe the suppliers' manufacturing capabilities and the buyer requirements that range widely from manufacturing costs to eco-friendly design. Such an ontology dedicated to supplier discovery has yet to be developed. MSDL(Manufacturing Service Description Language) provides the basis for defining terms and their relationships in the ontology. Thus, the objective of this paper is to extend MSDL into a new ontology suitable for supplier discovery in mold manufacturing industry. In addition, a new ontology development method for supplier discovery will be proposed. Finally prototype demonstrations are provided to show a feasibility of the proposed ontology in mold manufacturing domains.

Today, many manufacturing companies realize that collaboration is crucial for their survival. Especially, in the perspective of quality, the importance of collaboration is emphasized because economic loss increases exponentially while defective parts go through the process in supply chain. However, the manufacturing companies are facing two main difficulties in implementing collaborative relationships with their suppliers. First, it is difficult for the suppliers to produce reliable products due to their obsolete facilities. The problem gets worse for second- or third-tire vendors. Second, the companies experience the lack of universally understandable set of terminology and effective methodologies for knowledge representation. Ontology is one of the best approaches to expressing and processing a domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose the manufacturing ontology-based quality prediction framework to represent and share the knowledge of industrial environment and to predict product quality in manufacturing processes. In addition, we develop the ontology-based quality prediction system based on the proposed framework. We carried out a series of experiments for an injection molding process at an automotive part supplier. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed framework and system can be successfully applicable in manufacturing industry.

Up-to-date enlargement of the scale of global outsourcing has brought about the need of systematic and efficient tools for competitive supplier discovery located in various areas. A web-based business supporting system, referred to as Excellent Manufacturer Scouting System(EMSS), is being developed to serve core business functions including supplier discovery, negotiation, and collaboration between overseas buyers and domestic suppliers throughout the process of supply chain formation. In this paper, a supplier assessment model devoted to evaluation of core manufacturing capability is proposed by targeting small and medium sized mold companies. The assessment model will eventually be loaded to EMSS. Even if many well-designed models for supplier assessment have been presented in literature, most of them limit the evaluation criteria to somewhat general information on a given supplier, such as cost, delivery time, quality, rather than core manufacturing capability itself. This research is pioneering work on supplier assessment from the viewpoint of manufacturability. The proposed assessment model classifies assessment indices into six criteria, which have been drawn by intensive survey and analysis of the mold industry. Actual assessment indices for each criterion are also presented along with an exemplary evaluation result.

In modern society, the importance of inter-enterprise collaboration on supply chain is more emphasizing, depending on the industrial structure is going advanced. Therefore, the studies for advancement of inter-enterprise collaboration are taking, and especially the studies about how IT systems affect those advancement are taking. However, there are a shortage of recognition to each IT systems on B2B collaboration, additionally there is not much study of its application. In this study, we analyze the Performance Model relationship between the level and the importance of IT system for B2B collaboration in small and medium-sized enterprise, and draw a priority order for improvement of IT systems for its effective practical use.

Most manufacturing companies participate in various types of active collaboration to enhance competitive advantages in their arenas. In this paper, we introduce a data warehouse system that is designed for manufacturing collaboration. Just as enterprise information systems, collaboration support systems also need functions of performance measurement and monitoring. For this reason, we devise a new approach to measuring and evaluating performance of manufacturing collaboration. Specifically, we first present a concept of process warehouses for manufacturing collaboration. Next, we design a data schema of collaborative process warehouses to store and monitor collaboration performances. Finally, we implement a prototype system to support performance management of manufacturing collaboration. The proposed system can be used to effectively maintain and continuously improve collaboration in manufacturing industry.

Traditional business process management systems provide verification tools of process models to deploy and automate the models. However, there are not so many studies on how to maintain systematically collaborative process models such as supply chain processes when companies are willing to change and update the collaborative process models. In this paper, we analyze change patterns of collaborative processes and declare 19 change patterns. In addition, we apply the change patterns to the process interoperability patterns in order to identify the change problems in case of independent process changes of collaborative processes. As a result, we devise an independency checking algorithm of process changes in collaborative processes.

Very special and tentative considerations including emotional aspects are required to apply any new mechanism and methodologies for manufacturing fields due to several reasons. This study reviews the characteristics of manufacturing collaborations through specific cases applied digital engineering to enhance the collaboration performance in manufacturing domains. Two cases of collaboration related with automotive manufacturing process are analyzed to extract meaningful insights for better collaboration model suggestions. The first case deals the robot simulation to find out advance errors in jig and fixture design during the various welding process of body-in-whites. The effective communication protocol to share their idea and agreed schedules are essential for this collaboration. More severe requirement of collaboration between R&D and manufacturing departments are studied in the second case for e-coating process. The invisible barriers among different departments are lowered by the process application of Computer Aided Engineering which can make sure their own interesting effectively. Those technical and managerial suggestions can be used when the information system and standard process are sought to implement and update not only when innovation projects are executed.

Recently, the interoperability has become more important to enhance the net-centric capabilities of the warfighter. DITA (Defense Information Technical stAndard) is the set of IT standards for improving interoperability, scalability, effectiveness, and efficiency. In this paper, we analyzed the standardizing process to derive the selection criteria and structurized the derived selection criteria using the KJ (Kawakita Jiro) method. Finally, we developed an evaluation model for selecting a standard for DITA using AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process). As a result, we present eight selection criteria (maintainability, trend, stability, portability, effect of other standard, constraint of the network, and applicability to the systems). We also applied some examples that several IT standards to our selection model for validating the model. We expect our model to help to decide objectively whether the new standard can be listed in DITA.

There are few factors like a due date observance of the customer's order, reducing the manufacturing lead time, and minimizing the inventory investment to successfully run the manufacturing system. It is difficult for corporation and a person concerned to be offered indicators to achieve few factors mentioned above from complex manufacturing systems having much fluctuations. Simplified-DBR based on TOC(Theory of Constraints) is a management paradigm which can offer indicators to effectively face with fluctuating market's needs when market's demand is smaller than a capacity of manufacturing system. This paper is offering a core indicator and management model which is needed to successfully run the manufacturing system for corporation and a person concerned who have short experience and knowledge and newly construct Sinplified-DBR manufacturing system. Thus, this paper provides a systemic guidance in the offered model through the simulation.

This study describes a real-time location monitoring system developed for efficient operation of workplace in plant equipment maker. This monitoring system can be applied for indoor and outdoor working environment respectively. By using the real-time tracking system based on RTLS, it is possible to track worker's movement and location of working object under indoor working environment. For outdoor working environment, the real-time monitoring system based on IDGPS is applied for work safety and balanced workload. A case study is provided to evaluate the performance of the real-time monitoring system.

This paper considers the preventive maintenance scheduling problem of the cluster tool which is one of the most important manufacturing equipments in the next-generation semiconductor production environment. We define a random process that expresses the successive amount of chemicals accumulating inside the tool. Based on the renewal theory, we find the expected value and probability distribution of the time that the amount of accumulated chemicals exceeds a predetermined level. For a given probability that the accumulated chemicals exceeds the predetermined level we present a method to obtain the number of chamber operations to perform the preventive maintenance of that chamber. In addition, a method to get the preventive maintenance schedule for the whole cluster tool is presented. A numerical example is provided to illustrate our method.

The steering gear box for mid-heavy duty electric vehicles are usually produced by only a few specialized companies. The special techniques, such as designing, producing and testing technology have been veiled. For this reason, steering gear boxes are imported from other country. The durability test with the electric vehicle which is satisfies the design parameters takes several years, and a prototype is installed in the real vehicle for the test. In this research, the steering gear box of the steering system was developed based on the reverse engineering and the testing methods and the steering gear box development process have been suggested. The prototype is also developed with the CAD and CAE tools. Developed steering gear box have been tested in torque tester and have satisfied requied torque. As a result, the process and testing methods studied in this research are useful in the development processes of electric vehicles steering system.

Recently, the postal service encounters the various changes in the overall mail environment including the reduction of letter volume, keen competition of the private parcel service and EMS, diversification of customers' demand and etc. In this environment, Korea Post is considering new concept of postal service in order to provide the mail service based on informatization and automation to a client and secures the predominance in competition. We analyze the current environment of postal service for applying the gCRM (Geographic Customer Relationship Management). We propose some possible application fields and present an efficient phased application plan for each field.